With Friends Like These... (19 page)

“For example? Anybody specifically at last night’s party?”

He nodded. “Terry Wiley, for one. He’s no friend anymore. Lyle ripped Ace of Hearts off him.”

“No,” I said. “If that were true, he would have gone to court, would have—”

“Did. Poor slob lost. No proof. Who keeps carbons from high school?”

“Maybe the claim was fake. Wiley’s a science teacher, not a writer.”

“Meet his wife? Ruined him. He gave up trying.”

I could believe that.

“Lyle sounds good. Pure salesman, pure talk, but no ideas and no talent. Knockoffs. Oklahoma! on the moon, or Double O Seven with Siamese twin agents. Junk. His whole career: a show, TV series, revival, and spinoff—all from that one idea. Terry Wiley’s idea. Terry Wiley’s old script, too.” Quinn’s dislike of speaking ill of the dead—in fact of speaking at all—did not extend to the newly dead Lyle. I wondered when I was going to hear someone besides Hattie and her sidekick Alice speak well of him.

I considered Terry Wiley as the possible murderer, but was stymied by his wife’s insistence on having her stomach pumped. Possibly the ties that bind have an escape clause when one of the partners is about to commit murder. Maybe Terry simply didn’t tell Janine what he was up to. Or maybe Janine’s performance was only that, designed to deflect suspicion.

And perhaps Quinn’s sudden willingness to talk about Wiley was also a way of keeping attention elsewhere and off himself. Quinn had been robbed, too, or thought he’d been. If Lyle was going to steal a show, a hit, then the least he could have done was share the spoils with his partner.

Quinn. Wiley. Sybil. Tiffany. Shepard. Even Reed. Good grief!

How could anyone suspect my motiveless mother when there was a covey of potential villains at hand?

And what the devil was I doing with one of them? In an eyeblink and one taciturn farewell, I was out of there.

Macavity was playing feline famine, eyeing me balefully and yowling pitifully, although his starvation act was a hard sell, given both the size of his belly and the brimming container of dry food on the floor.

“I’m hungry, too,” I muttered. I nonetheless opened a can of his beloved glop before I dared to take off my coat.

I wondered if I should talk to my brother-in-law about my parents’ potential legal problems. Sam specialized in corporate law, but surely he’d have a better idea than I of what to do in case of impending criminal disaster.

Perhaps my parents should flee back to Florida. Maybe even a quick trip across the water to the Bahamas. Didn’t all manner of shady characters gamble and gambol there with no danger to their persons? Could a nice but wrongly accused couple from Florida join them?

Meanwhile, I studied my refrigerator, which featured the rank remains of what had once been broccoli, a plastic-wrapped wing that worried me because I couldn’t remember having broiled chicken since mid-January, an extremely hard circle that had once been a cold cut slice, and cheese that had mutated into a St. Patrick’s Day ornament.

I jealously eyed Macavity’s full dish. Where was the equity in our relationship? I always thought about his welfare. It was high time he thought about mine. He needed sensitivity training.

“Cat,” I said, “I’m going to tell you a true story. A parable.” I didn’t wait for permission, or even for Macavity’s attention. “In the time of King Richard the Third,” I said, “there lived a nobleman named Sir Henry Wyat. Sir Henry was accused of political crimes and sent to the Tower of London, condemned to die of starvation.”

Macavity snarfed his food without glancing my way, but I persisted. “Sir Henry would definitely have starved, except that his brave and true cat crept down the chimney every single day for months, each time bringing him a freshly killed pigeon.

“The King heard about it, thought it a miracle, and released Wyat. Now what do you think of that heroic, clever cat?”

Macavity eyed me with a baleful yellow glance. If he’d known how to snicker or say sucker, he would have. “Thanks a lot,” I told him. “You were supposed to become inspired.”

I therefore faced another cereal night without so much as a raw pigeon to liven things up. Damn Richard Quinn. Damn me, for assuming my restaurant appointment might include food.

I dialed Mackenzie and spoke with his answering machine. “I’m home,” I said, “and in case you haven’t yet polished off that pasta, I’m interested.” I wasn’t counting on it, though. He’s a detective, after all. If he wanted to find pasta, he would have, hours ago.

Macavity sauntered off to the living room to digest his repast. He was, I had to acknowledge, neither heroic nor particularly handsome. His fur is an odd gray-brown that looks like the contents of a vacuum cleaner bag. His feet are enormous. But all the same, he was mine.

I filled my bowl with Cheerios, poured in the half inch of milk remaining in the carton, and vowed to start keeping shopping lists, to become my own wife. I make that vow at least once a week.

The mail was the bleak, generic stuff of life: bills and discount coupons for services I never requested. No one had dialed my number all day. I took my potage into the living room, my feet dragging like a drab character in a Russian short story. A Chekhovian clerk with an answering machine.

“C’mere, cat,” I cajoled, but Macavity is proof of my mother’s old warning: give a guy what he wants, and then he won’t want you. Once fed, Macavity was less committed to our relationship, and he stayed in the middle of the floor and groomed himself.

The Long Night’s Journey into Self-Pity had begun. No mail, no calls, no food, no cat, and a mother who’s a murder suspect. Woe was me.

The Russians were better at bleakness. I was boring even myself.

Besides, maybe Mom wasn’t a suspect anymore, or at least not the only one. Hattie had blamed my mother yesterday and Lizzie this afternoon.

I looked longingly at the phone. It wasn’t his pasta that made me yearn for Mackenzie. Among other parts, I craved his brain, needed to talk with him about all this. Where was he?

On the other hand, if he returned this minute and picked up the phone, what was I going to do? Point a finger at innocent Lizzie? Her chubby and somehow pitiful face hovered like an ungrinning Cheshire Cat in front of me. Not a killer’s face. I would swear to it.

But perhaps she was a witness. Had the police been able to get her calmed down enough to question her?

I tried to think, although it was difficult being thoroughly logical on a bowl of Cheerios. But whenever I decided not to bother, I saw a vision of my mother peering out from between bars.

So, then. If somebody had doctored the tarts—and if I refused to consider that the doctor had been one of my parents—then who could it have been? I started at the beginning with the messenger service, but that was so farfetched, so completely reliant on coincidence, that I put it at the bottom of my list.

More logically, the tampering took place at The Boarding House, most likely in the kitchen, and if not at Lizzie’s hands, then probably under her nose.

Perhaps she’d seen something out of the ordinary, even if she didn’t recognize it as such at the time. Perhaps I’d recognize it.

Information gave me the number of The Boarding House, and I dialed. “I was wondering how you’re doing,” I said. “Last night I didn’t really have a chance to—”

“Last night. Oh, sure. I remember you!” She sounded as if I were the Mounties come to save the girl and the day. “Thank you for calling me. I feel like I’m—I feel like—he isn’t back, and I’m going crazy and there aren’t any guests today but I don’t know whether—I mean if I leave and they find him—”

I had to say her name three times, increasing volume and force with each repetition, before she seemed to hear, and even then it took her a while to decelerate and catch her breath.

“Are you all alone?” I asked, softly.

I heard a sniffled intake of breath, a stifled sob of agreement. Poor child, I thought, although she wasn’t a child. But she was nonetheless needy. “Tell you what.” Mackenzie had not answered my phone message, the cat was having a postprandial nap, and breakfast cereal did not a dinner make. “If you feel in the mood for company, and if you won’t take it as an insult to your excellent cooking, how about I pick up hoagies and soda and bring them to your place?”

You might have thought I had offered to bring over the Holy Grail.

I felt gratified, but if asked, I couldn’t have said whether my motive was a desire to provide comfort and companionship, to drill her silly about what she might have observed in her kitchen, to more carefully aim the beam of suspicion onto her bright red hair, or to simply have a strong reason to go out and snag a hoagie.

“Wait.” She sounded mournful again. “My diet! I can’t eat that kind of stuff.”

Anyone who remembers a diet does not qualify as distraught in my book. I no longer quibbled about my mixed motives.

* * *

Lizzie appeared to have discovered the first honest Overnight Weight Loss Method. Although she was still roly-poly, she looked dramatically diminished, as if the past day had devoured her.

I handed over one of the Styrofoam boxed salads and a small container of oil-free dressing, miffed that her food virtue had made me too guilt-ridden to buy myself the much-desired hoagie. This is a female form of macho—who can desire less food, be less hungry?—but this time it was no game for Lizzie. Only for me.

“Oh, miss!” She was reverting to her Dickensian meekness.

“Mandy. Please.” I followed her into the kitchen, which seemed her spot, whether or not she was working, and pulled a high stool up to the center butcher-block table. The room around us was clean and smooth-surfaced, and not half as alive as last night, when the counters and ovens had been filled with lovely edibles.

Lizzie and I opened our salad containers and wielded plastic forks above unthrilling leafy greens. “I don’t think you should be here all alone,” I said. “I thought—last night, didn’t you say you were going to see somebody today? A doctor?”

“I did. He prescribed pills to calm me and made me see another doctor, too. A psychiatrist. He said I had suffered a traumatic shock. I’m supposed to go back tomorrow, but I don’t know. Bad enough I left today—but what if he came back while I was gone?”

“Your father? If you were gone, he’d come in or wait, Lizzie.”

There was a final bit of solidity and adult logic missing from the girl, keeping her a child.

Her deep brown eyes widened. “I can’t leave again. How would he find me? And what’s happened to him? He never disappears like this! I don’t know what to do about anything. We’ve had two cancellations today, even though it wasn’t my fault—you know it wasn’t my fault, don’t you?”

I decided that I did know that. It wasn’t my mother or father’s fault, and it wasn’t Lizzie’s.

“I’m sure he’s sick,” she said. “Heart attack or I don’t know. Whenever I see him, in my head, sprawled out on the floor like…like…” She closed her eyes and shook her head and seemed to have trouble inhaling.

Wait. We had switched hims in mid-sentence. “Like what?” I whispered, sure she meant Lyle, spread out on the floor, dying.

Her eyes opened wide and she looked at me as if I might have the answer. “I get so scared if I let myself see it. I know something horrible, horrible has happened—and I know it has, it did, but I don’t mean that. Something else horrible, do you understand? Do you think I’m crazy?”

I sidestepped both questions and speared a curly-edged lettuce leaf. “Is this the same feeling you had yesterday? Here, in the kitchen before the party. Remember? You became frightened and felt ill and you didn’t know why.”

She looked puzzled. “I can’t remember. Only something like not being here for a while.”

“Then where were you?” I was nearly whispering.

“Somewhere scary.” I could barely hear her. “What’s happening to me? What’s going on?” Her voice regained some strength. “And what’s happened to my father?”

“You’re very close, aren’t you?”

She shrugged. “We’re all we have. He’d just never scare me by staying away on purpose. He knew I was nervous—he was nervous, too. That’s why he went for cigarettes. He was trying not to smoke, but he was too shaky after…after…” Her voice rose into the dangerously thin air of hysteria again.

“I’m sure the police will find him.”

She shook her head. “He’s not a suspect and they’re real busy—”

“Is the President still in town?”

“They told me that lots of men walk away from their families that way. But he wouldn’t. He was just so nervous after Mr. Zacharias fell down.”

She had odd and childish ways of describing events. Fell down did not seem the appropriate way to describe a dying man.

“I called all the hospitals and asked for him, but he isn’t registered anywhere. All he did was go out for cigarettes. I’m sure he’s been mugged or even—” She couldn’t say the word.

“Don’t assume the worst,” I said. “Hang in there.” The words sounded hollow and futile. The girl had problems. Her father was missing, her livelihood was disappearing, and, even before a man had died after eating her food, she’d shown signs of a serious panic attack, cause unknown. I hoped she didn’t know that as of this afternoon, Hattie was also blaming Lyle’s death on her.

“And that old lady—that old lady called me today,” she said.

There went that last hope.

“She said she knew that everything was my fault. That I knew it, too. What did she mean? She sounded—I feel sorry for her, losing her son and all, but she was cruel. It wasn’t my fault. Why didn’t anybody else get sick if it was my fault? Why would she be that way?”

“People are not themselves sometimes when they’re in a state of grief.” I felt like one of those old-fashioned arcade dolls—put a nickel on the lever, push, and I’ll hand you back a platitude. I could become a team, along with Hattie’s friend Alice. “She’s old,” I continued. “Needs to blame somebody for this tragedy. Ignore her.”

“I told her—I told the police—he ate a tart. He came in after the salad course and said they were irresistible and that he had to break his diet and have one and I shouldn’t tell. There was a little plate of them, you know?”